A succession of Tory and Labour ministers refused to accept publicly that
repeated exposure to organo-phosphate chemicals could cause irreparable
damage

I was intrigued last week to see the Guardian revealing a “secret report”, which showed that 24 years ago the government was well aware that it had been responsible for one of the most shocking public health disasters of our time.

In fact, I first revealed the contents of this report as long ago as 2002, because for years I had been reporting here on the horrifying story of how the health of thousands of farmers and their families had been destroyed by using highly toxic organo-phosphate (OP) chemicals to dip their sheep, as a protection against parasites.

When the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) commissioned its own internal study into this disaster, its findings in 1991 were so devastating that they had to be ruthlessly suppressed. Ministers were only too aware that the government had forced the farmers to use these chemicals, which its own Veterinary Medicines Directorate had licensed as safe to use. Although the government quietly dropped the compulsory use of OPs for dipping, without explanation, a succession of Tory and Labour ministers refused to accept publicly that repeated exposure to them could cause irreparable damage – because, it seemed, any public admission that they were as dangerous as the HSE had found them to be might trigger off a major scandal resulting in tens of millions of pounds of compensation claims.

The cover-up of the OPs disaster in fact ran much wider than just their use in sheep dip. Indeed it continues to this day, in attempts to suppress the appalling damage done to the health of scores of airline pilots and crews by air bled off into their cabins from the engines, contaminated by OPs used as a thinning agent in their oil.

Repeated exposure to OPs could cause serious damage (Photo: AP)

The colossal tragedy caused by OPs was one of the most harrowing stories I have ever reported, as I met and spoke to dozens of farmers, drivers and others whose lives they had destroyed. Within a couple of miles of where I live in Somerset, I came across four cases, including two people who died of OP poisoning, and another neighbour who, after years in a wheelchair, died only last year. The heroes and heroines of this awful story were a tiny group of doctors, scientists and campaigners (even including one or two politicians), who valiantly tried to expose the horror of what was going on, against a phalanx of ministers, lawyers and official scientists seemingly determined to prevent the real nature of the disaster getting out.

Chief among those gallant campaigners was the Countess of Mar, a hereditary peer and herself an OP sheep dip victim, who year after year raised this issue in the House of Lords. It was she who, in 2002, finally managed to obtain a leaked copy of that damning HSE report, passing it on to me to write about it. But well done the Guardian for catching up 13 years later.

In fact, I did also write about that report in greater detail in 2007, in a book called Scared to Death. Its final chapter, entitled “Licensed to Kill”, is still the fullest overall account of this awful story yet to have been published.

I was once attacked by the wife of another Conservative agriculture minister, who said “the trouble with you Booker is that you are so terribly Right-wing”. I replied, with a smile: “If to write week after week in defence of the victims of chemical poisoning by multi-national chemical companies is Right-wing, then I suppose I am Right-wing.”

However shocking was the injury done to all those thousands of crippled victims, the part played by the ministers and lawyers who aided and abetted that cover-up made it even more so.